For the last several years, AAAI has organized the annu- al symposium on Educational Advances in AI, colocat- ed with the annual AAAI conference. Other conferences, such as FLAIRS, have organized AI education tracks in
the past. Additional landmark events in the past 20 or so
years that looked at the challenges of AI education have
included the AI Education Workshop held at the 2008 AAAI
conference and the Improving Instruction of Introductory
Artificial Intelligence symposium held at the 1994 AAAI Fall
Symposium.

To quote Marti Hearst, the organizer of the 1994 symposium (Hearst 1994): “This symposium was motivated by the
desire to address an oft-voiced complaint that introductory
artificial intelligence is a notoriously difficult course to teach
well.” With the regular progression of the field and recent
successes such as autonomous cars, deep learning, and IBM’s
Watson system, this situation has not become easier. At the
same time, recent innovations in pedagogical technologies,
such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), smart-phones, and smart classrooms, have revolutionized how we
view the art of teaching. We believe that now is a good time
to take stock of state-of-the-art practices in the teaching of
AI, as well as propose a vision for AI education in the future.

This issue of AI Magazine includes five articles at the cutting edge of AI education. Each covers a subject of current
concern to the AI education community. We note that the
subject area expertise of the authors covers a wide range
including robotics, knowledge-based systems, ethics,
machine learning, and game theory.

The article Ask Me Anything About MOOCs by Douglas
Fisher, Charles Isbell, and Michael Littman was a unique
project. The editors crowdsourced 10 questions about
MOOCs from the recipients of the AAAI and SIGCSE mailing
lists. The questions were then posed to authors Fisher, Isbell,
and Littman — educators who have unique, relevant experiences to lend their perspective on those issues.